


Clean and Simple

by phoenixflight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bottom Dean Winchester, Case Fic, Dubious Consent, Happy Ending, M/M, Magic Made Them Do It, Murder-Suicide, Sibling Incest, early season, first time in a long time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:47:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22012834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixflight/pseuds/phoenixflight
Summary: “Four murder-suicides in the last hundred years in the same tiny town? It's definitely our kind of thing.”
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 120





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 12 Days of Wincestmas! Enjoy ;)  
> Dubcon and mentions of noncon in the context of ghosts

Dean shut the motel door and chained it out of habit. “Have you even moved since I left?” 

Sam flipped him off without straightening out of his hunched posture over the laptop, which kinda proved Dean’s point. “I think I found something.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Uh-huh. Check this out.” Sam pivoted the laptop so that Dean could look at the article he had pulled up.

Dean put down the greasy bag of breakfast sandwiches he was carrying on the scarred motel table and squinted at the screen. 

“Gross dude, you’re getting grease marks on my notes,” Sam complained. 

Dean tuned it out with long practice, speed-reading. “Yeah, could be our kind of thing.” 

“Four murder-suicides in the last hundred years in the same tiny town? It's definitely our kind of thing.” Sam rubbed his neck with a grimace that said he’d been hunched over a screen too long. When he stretched his shoulders, he elongated like a cat. Or a bear. Sam was huge now, and Dean still wasn’t used to it. The gangly height he’d had when he left for college was now balanced by his giant shoulders. Dean found his eyes drawn to them over and over. 

“Murder weapon?” he asked instead. 

“Different every time. No obvious correlation between the pairs either. All ages, genders, locals and people passing through.” Sam always got all earnest about research, looking up from under his floppy banks. Dean’s stomach swooped a little, remembering Sam looking up at him just like that, on his knees. But that was a kid thing, in the past. They didn’t do that anymore. 

“Okay,” he said, leaning back and putting space between himself and Sam’s stupid face. He was still aching a little from getting thrown around by Sam’s demonic blonde, and Dad was in the wind again. A distraction was just what they needed. “Elk Run, where the hell is that? There’s gotta be like, fifteen Elk Runs in the lower 48.” 

“Nebraska, this time. It's only like 2 hours south of here.”

“Huh.” Dean rubbed his chin, feeling two days of stubble, just beginning to itch. “It’s not in the journal?” 

Sam shook his head. “It’s close enough I thought why not take a detour.” 

Dean couldn’t tell if that was progress or not, had no fucking clue what progress even meant in this fucked up family of theirs, but he did know how to kill bad things. “Alright. I guess we got ourselves a case.”

Elk Run was a sleepy, well kept little town, the kind with more churches than stop lights and flowers in the yards. The deaths were happening in the corn fields to the west, always in the same two mile radius. 

“What do you think?” Dean asked, looking at Sam's notes. “Research first or farm walk?” 

“Research,” Sam responded, not looking up from his notes. 

“I'm shocked,” Dean grumbled. 

At the local library it turned out that the article Sam found on the four murder-suicides had missed three more less well-documented incidents, including the oldest. 

“This might be the first one,” Sam said tapping the side of the microfiche machine. “Anyway I can't find anything else. But it might just have not gotten reported further back.” 

“So who are our patients zero?” Dean asked, leaning over his shoulder. The library was stiflingly warm and Sam had stripped down to his t-shirt. His biceps bulged distractingly.

“Mildred and Thomas Newburg. In 1883 Thomas killed Mildred and then himself with a harvest knife. There wasn't a local paper at that point but it was grisly enough to get mentioned in the Omaha news.”

“Classic wife bashing?” Dean guessed. 

“I guess. They must have been newlyweds, they were both teenagers. Mildred born 1862 and Thomas two years older.”

Dean grimaced. Half the time, humans were the worst part of this job. “You said there wasn’t a common thread with the victims - they weren’t all couples?”

“No. It’s a little odd if it’s a domestic violence scenario. Charlotte and Michael Dornan in 1934 were twins. In 1987 it was two men, John Anders and William Denier, although they could have been a couple of course. And the most recent incident two months ago was a pair of siblings also, Linleigh and Toby Morison.” 

“Does it say where the Newburgs are buried?”

“No. Courthouse?” 

Dean sighed. “Lead on, Macduff.” 

They played the role of dutiful grandsons, acting as errand boys for their ailing grandmother who was interested in family genealogy but too sick to track down hard copy records herself. 

“She was so excited when I showed her how to use Google,” Sam said earnestly. “But there’s just so many things that haven’t been digitized.” 

The charmed matronly woman working at the courthouse left them alone in the records room. 

Since the newspaper article from the 19th century had given Mildred and Thomas’s birth years, it was easy enough to find them. Dean was grudgingly impressed. Not every podunk town kept records this neat going back so far. They found Thomas Newburg first. 

“Mildred will be under her maiden name,” Sam said from the other side of the room. “See if you can find the marriage certificate and we can figure out what it was.” 

“No death certificate yet?” 

“Nada.” 

Dean did a mental calculation on what year they would have married, given that Mildred had been fifteen when she died, and then glanced at the box of records from 1862. There couldn’t have been that many “Mildreds” born in a town like this in that same year. Probably easier to just start there. 

He shuffled through the records, dusty old papers making his fingers feel dry, and stopped abruptly. “Sammy. What are the parent’s names on Thomas’s birth certificate?” 

“Uh, Constance and Thomas Newburg, why?” 

Dean held up a worn sheet of paper. “She wasn’t his wife,” he said grimly. “She was his sister.” 

Sam gaped at him and then came over to look at the birth certificate. “Holy shit. Then the others…” 

“Same last names? Could be.” 

“Except the two men in the 80s.” 

“Either way, we’d better check them all.” 

It took the better part of the afternoon but they found all except the one pair who had been out-of-towners in 1973, whose birth records were elsewhere. All of them were siblings, including half brothers Anders and Denier. By the time they were finished, Dean’s neck was sore from bending over the table in the records room, and his throat was dry with dust. 

“So, new working theory,” Sam said. “Millie and Tom have some kind of a fight, he kills her, maybe it’s an accident, maybe not, and then turns the knife on himself. Then they play it out again on pairs of siblings that happen into the area together.” 

“It would explain the time distribution,” Dean agreed. “No pattern, just whenever siblings fitting the right profile showed up.” They met one another’s eyes briefly - no need to speak the question. They’d find out soon enough if they fit the profile, whatever it was. 

“No gravesite record, though,” Sam said. “It’s going to be flashlights and headstones.” 

“My favorite,” Dean deadpanned. “Should we go after the bones or check out the site of the murder first?”

“We don’t even know if the Newburgs were the first pair. I’d say we look at the crime scene, scan it for EMF, the usual. Let’s put these papers back.” Grunting, Sam unfolded himself from the rickety table and popped his back. 

“You okay, grampa?” Dean said. “Need your walker?” 

Sam pursed his lips in the expression that never failed to remind Dean of Sam’s mouth on his dick. Blowjobs had been the only way to shut him up sometimes in the worst of his teenage angst. Too bad that wasn’t on the table anymore. Dean dragged his eyes away from his brother’s mouth. 


	2. Chapter 2

Dean parked half a mile down the road and they got out and walked along the edge of the field. It was brown earth, covered in the coarse stubble of harvested corn. When the murder happened, the corn would have been high, shielding the scene from view of the road. The crime scene tape was gone, the blood washed away into the soil and the latest victims buried and mourned by now. Nothing to distinguish it from any other square of land in the millions of acres of heartland crop country except the penciled X on Sam’s map. 

Sighing, Dean shoved his hands in his pockets. “Anything?” 

The EMF meter in Sam’s hands was silent. “Not yet. We might have to come back later tonight.” 

Dean walked a few steps further into the field, damp earth compacting under his boots, scanning the ground, alert for a flicker of movement. “The sun’ll be down in an hour. We could try that diner on Main Street, kill some time.”

“Maybe,” Sam sighed. “The courthouse will be closed by then if we need to look up more…” The EMF meter wailed at the same moment Dean caught a shadow out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, reaching for his Colt at the small of his back, knowing it was useless against a spirit. He’d left the shotgun and salt rounds in the car like an  _ idiot. _ Sure it was supposed to be just recon but when did that ever work out for them? 

It was a man, translucent and fritzing slightly like an image on a TV with the antena adjusted wrong. He wore tattered trousers and suspenders over a stained shirt - a poor country boy’s attire that could have belonged to any time over the course of a hundred years. “Is that Thomas?” Dean asked out of the corner of his mouth, backing toward Sam. 

“Don’t know. There wasn’t a picture,” Sam said, not taking his eyes off the ghost. The EMF was squealing in his hands and Sam shut it off. It couldn’t tell them anything that they didn’t already know at this point. 

Another figure blinked into existence, this one even more unsteady and faint than the other. A woman in a long dress, a shawl around her shoulders. There were dark marks on her face but the image wasn’t clear enough to tell whether they were bruises or smudges of dirt. Her hair was tangled and coming down from its knot. “Mildred?” he asked, half to Sam, half to the apparition. 

There was a sudden rushing sound of air, a faint shrieking like a distant bird of prey, and the ghost of the man materialized suddenly inches from Dean’s face. He jerked back, hand on his gun, and then cold enveloped him like hitting ice water in a belly flop, so hard he couldn’t breathe. Dean was vaguely aware of Sam shouting next to him and tried to move but wasn’t in control of his own limbs. 

His vision blurred, darkening at the edges, and his head was full of voices, scraps of memory that weren’t his. The man,  _ Thomas _ , it  _ was _ Thomas, turned to look at his sister, dragging Dean’s body with him. 

Mildred was looking out through Sam’s eyes, and Dean had a moment of clarity in which to think  _ oh shit  _ before he was swamped with a wave of guilt and lust so strong his stomach rolled. He stalked forward, needing his hands on his brother more than he’d ever needed anything, and hating himself for it, so viscerally and deeply that even he was a little surprised. It wasn’t like he was a stranger to that emotion, but this flowed through him like a tsunami, like a wildfire. Like something that could  _ kill.  _

Dean gripped his brother’s wrists when Sam lifted his hands to fend him off, tugging Sam’s body hard against his. When Sam opened his mouth to say something, Dean crashed their mouths together before he could, licking and biting, consuming. Sam groaned around his tongue, squirming a little. He’d gotten big enough that Dean couldn’t overpower him by sheer force but he was on top of his game and his little brother was four years out of practice, the last couple of months notwithstanding. 

Dean hooked an ankle behind Sam’s knee, and took him down with the oldest move in the book, landing on top of his sister, on top of Mildred who gasped and whimpered beneath him and he  _ hated _ her for it, for how fragile and lovely she was, for how much he wanted her - and then Dean blinked and it was Sam again, the opposite of fragile, frowning at him, and Dean leaned forward and kissed him again, helpless and needy. 

Their legs were tangled together, Dean’s hard-on grinding sweetly painful against Sam’s thigh, Sam’s rubbing against Dean’s stomach, zipper digging into Dean’s stomach where his shirt had ridden up. It felt so good after so long to touch Sam like this, and then the pleasant warmth in his stomach knotted back into horror and fury. The soft earth was getting all over their clothes, crumbling between Dean’s fingers as he fisted a hand in Sam’s hair to kiss him harder, and Sam was leaving muddy smears on his face and his back as he pawed at him, dirt to mark him as the dark, disgusting thing that he was. 

Dean didn’t care that they were dry-fucking in full view of the county road - just needed Sam so bad, hating himself for it, hating  _ Sam _ for it. He felt the gun, shoved down the back of his jeans, metal cool against his skin as he rolled his hips. He could end this all, right now, make them both clean again. 

Anger was clean. Righteous fury was clean, and he desperately needed something clean, something  _ good _ , something other than this horrified guilt, this self loathing so vicious that Dean wanted to lash out, to hurt something to relieve some of the agonizing, rending pain inside him. Wrong, so fucking  _ wrong _ what he was doing to his sister.

The dissonance of that thought jarred him and he blinked down at Sam beneath him, all the hurt and anger dimmed for a moment under a wave of fond familiarity. Sam still wrinkled his forehead the same way when he was getting off, still clutched at Dean’s shoulders like he had when he was smaller, when Dean could still hold him up and fuck him against the wall of a gas station bathroom if they were quick. Still looked up through his eyelashes with a softness like Dean was the most important thing in the world. 

Dean had missed this so much and it wasn’t wrong; it felt so  _ right _ . 

_ Sinner.  _ Filthy, corrupt, monstrous. The horror rose back up, lust and bile tangled together. He ground down harder against Sam’s cock and pressed his face into the hollow of Sam’s throat, breathing in the loamy, rich smell of the damp earth, and under it, the familiar smell of Sam, the smell of the small boy who’d shared his bed for years, _ you disgusting beast, she’s your baby sister…  _

Dean bit down viciously on the thick tendon of Sam’s neck and Sam howled, bucking under him, hands clenching in the back of his flannel, pulling him close, not pushing him away. Dampness pulsed between their groins as Sam came in his pants. His eyes fluttered shut, pink mouth open in an obscene, silent prayer. 

Sam was so beautiful when he came and Dean had stopped feeling guilty about this a long time ago,  _ years _ ago. There was nothing wrong with wanting something for themselves when the world was full of monsters and demons and  _ ghosts _ \- 

He froze, every muscle in his body trembling against Thomas’s spirit. His gun was pressed warm against the small of his back and there was a knife in his boot and a switchblade in his back pocket. A pounding litany like a rosary pulsed behind his temples -  _ Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam _ \- the only thing holding back the throbbing waves of furious guilt and loathing which had driven Thomas to kill his sister. 

Dean shuddered, feeling the pressure intensify behind his eyes, vision beginning to go dark - and then his brother threw a handful of rock salt into his face. 

There was silence back in their hotel room. Dean had let Sam have the first shower without even a squabble, and he was sitting at the table when Sam came out of the bathroom. His hands were clenched between his thighs, dirt stains on his knees, traces of Sam’s come drying on his fly. There was a knot in his stomach. 

Sam pulled on sweatpants and a t-shirt wordlessly and then sat down on the nearest bed, facing Dean. “My turn,” Dean said, bouncing to his feet without looking at Sam, and heading toward the shower. He heard Sam sigh behind him but wasn’t about to stop. 

Under the hot spray of the showerhead, Dean tried not to think about anything, but his aching balls and half-chubbed dick reminded him that a faceful of salt was not a substitute for getting off. Guiltily, resignedly, he jerked off fast and hard, and came thinking about Sam beneath him. 

Dean wasn’t sure if it was the ghostly mind-meld or just shared life experience but he felt like he understood Thomas, a little. It wasn’t like he would ever hurt Sammy - not more than he already had, in a myriad of ways over the years, of course - killing your sister because you felt bad about fucking her was counterproductive as hell, in Dean’s opinion. But self-loathing, that he understood. 

When there was no good excuse to dawdle any longer, he dried himself off and stepped out of the steamy warmth of the bathroom into the shock of the other room. 

“So. The Newburgs are our ghosts for sure,” Dean said, to forestall other kinds of inquiry. “Cemetery time. Nice move with the salt, by the way.” 

“...Yeah,” Sam said after a long pause, and Dean breathed out, reaching for his flannel. “Dean…” 

“And the others,” Dean continued hastily. “Caught up in the echo?” He frowned, a little bit of analytical curiosity getting the better of his desire to never think about any of it ever again. “The paper didn’t say anything about the others… uh. You know.” 

“Found with their pants down?” Sam said wryly. “No, although we didn’t check coroners' reports. Conservative small town like this might very well consider a detail like that unprintable.” 

“In today’s media?” Dean snorted. “Nothing that sells papers is unprintable.” 

“Well the alternative is that the two of us were more… suggestible to certain parts of the scenario than normal siblings,” Sam said, and Dean winced. 

“Doesn’t matter,” he grunted. “Once we light up the bones it’ll all be over.” 

“Dean,” Sam started again and Dean tensed. “You know you never hurt me, right?” 

“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Dean said shortly, back turned, wishing desperately to be anywhere else. Neck deep in a grave would be an improvement right about now. 

“When Mildred was riding me, I kept getting flashes of her memories, and Thomas was hurting her, but Dean, you never hurt me. Never. I wanted it. I begged you for it.” 

Dean lifted both hands as if he could ward off the sound waves like blows. “Forget it, Sammy. Let’s just get the shovels and salt and get gone, huh?” 

His brother said nothing, which Dean counted as a win as he checked the shotgun and loaded the salt rounds. 

“I’m sorry,” Sam said finally, just as Dean was running out of things to do with his hands. 

It startled him enough that Dean turned sharply. “What the fuck have you got to be sorry for?” 

Sam looked up through his bangs, mouth turned down miserably. “When I left. I’m not sorry I went but-” he hurried on as Dean grimaced, “It was never about leaving you, it wasn’t because we...I wasn’t trying to get away from you. It didn’t mean that I didn’t want…” he stopped and Dean felt like he’d stopped breathing right along with Sam’s words. 

“Didn’t want?” he ground out. 

Sam surged to his feet, all seven stupid feet of him, and crowded into Dean’s space. “You know, Dean.” 

“Sam,” Dean began, trying to jerk his head away as Sam reached for him, but Sam’s huge hands were cupping his jaw, strong enough that he would hurt himself fighting it, and he didn’t want to anyway, had never fought it - not like he maybe should have - not since the very first time Sammy crawled into his lap and said “Dean, can I?” 

He let Sam kiss him now, just like he had then, and maybe he should have been a better brother all along, but it felt so  _ good _ . The kiss was gentle compared to the hungry, bruising kisses in the cornfield. More familiar. Even after years sleeping with other people Sam still kissed the way he always had - the way Dean had taught him. 

There was a thread of Thomas still worming through Dean’s chest, an echo of his emotion. It wasn’t anything supernatural, just the guilt and self-recrimination of kissing his brother, starkly highlighted by the ghost. 

Sam made a frustrated noise into his mouth. “Stop  _ thinking _ so hard.” 

“That’s my line,” Dean started to say, but Sam was tipping him backward onto the nearest bed and landing on top of him, not bothering to be gentle, and Dean lost all the air in his lungs in a whoosh. 

Sam was still damp and warm from the shower, smelling like generic hotel soap, his huge warm body boxing Dean in - thick thighs on either side of his hips, huge shoulders blocking out the light. It felt safe. It felt right. 

Dean was broken inside, but he’d known that for years. He dug his fingers into his brother’s shaggy, soft hair and held on. 

He tried not to think too hard as they struggled out of their clothes, as Sam fished a bottle of lube out of Dean’s duffle - still in the same side pouch it had been in for easy access as teenagers - as Sam opened him up with his fingers, pressing reverent kisses to Dean’s face and chest. 

It wasn’t  _ thinking _ that was the problem, really, that had always been Sam’s arena. It was a feeling that he couldn’t shake, an unpleasant twist in his gut. But it was hard to focus on that when Sam’s fingers were stroking his prostate expertly, making him buck and groan. Dean’s dick bounced on his stomach, leaking, leaving sticky smears around his belly button. He felt electrified, skin tingling and tight as if it had shrunk two sizes. 

His quads strained with the stretch as Sam hefted up his thighs and pressed inside, and Dean bit back a shout. Sweat broke out across his entire body, the sharp ache of penetration rushing feverishly through him. Panting, he clutched at Sam’s shoulders. He had missed this, missed it so fucking much. 

If anything, it was better than it used to be, now Sam was older and stronger and more experienced, thrusting into him steady and even. Sammy never used to last when they did it this way around; usually had to finish Dean off with fingers in his slick hole and his mouth on Dean’s dick, or sometimes just rock inside him until his teenage refractory period gave him a second wind, but now, when Dean came Sam fucked him right through it like a machine until Dean was gasping and wrung out, sticky and boneless. Then he finally bent over Dean and bit down on his shoulder with a rough grunt as he came inside him, hips twitching. 

Afterward, they lay on wrecked sheets. Dean ached in places he hadn’t ached in years, and the warm euphoria of orgasm, and of having Sam’s warm body wrapped around his, had erased the last of the dark sensation from his gut. This was just who they were - who they had always been. He’d made his peace with that one hot summer years ago when Sam still wasn’t old enough to drive. No point in catching a conscience about it now. 

Dean had plenty of regrets, most of them things he carefully avoided thinking about, but his brother’s heartbeat thudding against his back and his soft cock tucked in the crease of Dean’s thighs wasn’t one of them. Fuck Thomas Newburg, anyway. He was gonna burn that sucker’s bones. 

The reminder of the grave-digging still on the agenda for the evening made every part of Dean’s body protest. He grimaced. “Hey, Sam?” His voice was raspy. 

“Mmm?” Sam hummed into the nape of his neck. 

“What are the odds that another pair of siblings is going to end up in that cornfield between now and tomorrow night?” 

Dean could feel Sam waking up a little to consider the question. “Very low,” he said finally. 

“So, uh. Whaddya say we do the cemetery tomorrow night?” 

Sam tightened his arm around Dean’s chest, thumb brushing the amulet. “Yeah. Sounds good.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love!


End file.
